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Next week I am attending a mini-conference in which a big tech company (I’ll call it BTC) has invited a group of academics to advise them. Everyone attending was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). The NDA I was sent initially didn’t define what was confidential, and had no time limit. So basically they’re asking everyone to keep secret who-knows-what forever. Does that make sense?

How can you protect confidential information if you don’t even know what is confidential? A fair NDA needs to spell it out. This is called a “marking requirement.” Any tangible materials containing proprietary information shared with you should be marked “confidential.” Ideally also, the agreement should say that if confidential information is disclosed orally, they will follow-up with a copy in tangible form marked confidential within a few weeks after the disclosure. That last part can be harder to get companies to agree to, because it’s a hassle.

Second, a fair NDA should have an end date. It’s not reasonable to ask you to assume a lifelong obligation, is it? They’re not going to tell me the formula for Coca-Cola—it’s stuff that changes rapidly. At the speed that things change in high tech, a three-year limit is fair. Five years at most.

I told my hosts at BTC that I’d please like some changes to the NDA, and they graciously complied. The back-and-forth process between their lawyers and my university’s lawyers took so long, I almost ended up not going to the event. They were reasonable, and the result is fair. But here’s my question: why doesn’t everyone always ask for more reasonable NDAs? If we all did, then they wouldn’t be sending out the unfair versions in the first place.

Companies keep asking people to sign ridiculous non-disclosure agreements, because folks sign them without objecting. If we all insist on reasonable NDAs, this will no longer be a problem.

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What do you all think about the ethics of doxing attendees at the white supremacist rally? Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. However, with the power of the crowd, the consequences are sometimes outpacing what a reasonable person would deem fair (example: puppy poo girl and Justine Sacco). And the consequences of the crowd making mistakes can be devastating to innocent people (like in the ‘find Boston Bombers‘ incident). So how do you evaluate the actions of the people doing the doxing in this case?

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If your Facebook newsfeed is like mine, you’ve probably seen a bunch of posts that say something like this one I saw this morning:

In honor of someone who means a lot to me…I’m going to say goodbye to some of you…… now I’m watching the ones who will have the time to read this post until the end. This is a little test, just to see who reads and who shares without reading!

These posts are like nails on a blackboard to me. There are a couple reasons. First, they misunderstand how the newsfeed works. Not all your friends see all your posts. So you can’t judge people by whether they respond—you can’t tell if they’ve seen it at all. Second, although the wording of each version of this sort of post varies, in most cases it implies “I read carefully. Some of you, though, are not being careful.” Can’t posters of this meme feel the smugness of the tone? It implies, “If you don’t read my long, wordy Facebook post all the way to the end, then you are a thoughtless and careless person.” Is that what you really meant to say? Third, the writer is imposing an obligation on his/her readers. Kurt Luther comments, “People’s timeless desire to impose chain letter-like obligations on others has made a smooth transition to the new medium.” Public Service Announcement: Please don’t post this meme.

I think that I understand the better impulse behind the meme. The poster is saying, “I have doubts about whether the connections we are forging on this website are meaningful. I am yearning for a deeper sense of connectedness to people I care about.” I like that impulse. So here’s my challenge: How can we express that desire for more meaningful connections without this obnoxious meme? If you have ideas, leave me a comment! (And thanks for reading to the end….)

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For me as a social computing researcher, some of the most insightful and useful parts of the research literature are qualitative sociology written thirty to fifty years ago. For example, The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg (1989) documents how people need a “third place”—one that is neither work nor home. Within the third places Oldenburg studied, he observed timeless patterns of human behavior like the role of “the regulars” and how people greet a newcomer. Or consider The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman, originally published in 1959. Goffman documents how people are always performing for one another, and the impressions they deliberately give may differ from the impressions given off (what people actually infer from someone’s performance). How could we even begin to understand social behavior on sites like Facebook and Twitter without Goffman as a foundation?

When I think about this style of research, I often think about how it would be reviewed if it were submitted for publication today. No doubt Goffman would be told his work was insufficiently scientific—how do you really know there are “impressions given off”? Can you measure them? I doubt he’d make it through the review process.

How do we know that Goffman’s observations are “true”? Honestly, we don’t. The “proof” is in how useful generations of researchers to follow have found his observations. Goffman took messy qualitative data, and used that as a touchstone for his own powers of inference and synthesis. His observations aren’t in the data, but emerged from a process of his examination of the data. It’s probably impossible to make a firm statement about how valuable this type of work is at the time of writing—the evidence is in the value that others find in building on the work later.

Contemporary researchers are still working in this style. I call writing in this mode “silk purse papers.” They say you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, except sometimes you can. Insights emerge from messy data in an act of interpretation. The first paper of my own that I would put in this category is my paper “Situated Support for Learning: Storm’s Weekend with Rachael,” published in Journal of the Learning Sciences in 2000. In it, I take a case study of a weekend in which one girl taught another to program and draw broader conclusions about the nature of support for learning—support for learning is more effective when it is richly connected to other elements of the learning environment. I can’t prove to you that those observations are valid, but I can say that others have found them useful.

I’m always vaguely embarrassed when I’m in the middle of writing a silk purse paper. A tiny little voice in my head nags, “You’re making stuff up. You could use this data to tell a dozen different stories. You’re saying what you want to say and pretending it’s science.” But then I remember Goffman, and try to cheer up. It may not be “science,” but it’s certainly a valid mode of naturalistic inquiry. Take a second and think about foundational writings in your area of expertise. How many of those papers are silk purses?

In fact I wonder if we are all always making silk purses. Just because a paper is quantitative does not make it any less interpretive. My colleagues and I just finished a complicated analysis of content people post on Facebook publicly versus post to friends only (to appear in CSCW 2017). It’s totally quantitative work. But what we chose to measure and not measure and how we explain what it means strike me as much acts of interpretation (to be evaluated by the passage of time) as the complicated stories we tell with qualitative data.

Where we as a field get into trouble is when people with naïve ideas about “science” start reviewing qualitative work, and get it wrong. Sociology of science and technology should be featured in more graduate programs in human-computer interaction and human-centered computing. And as a field we need to have a more nuanced conversation about interpretive work, and how to review it.

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Some time in the 1990s, I had terrible algae in my fish tank. I posted a question about it on USENET on the group alt.aquaria, and got a helpful answer from a guy I’ll call Oscar. Oscar really knows his fish, and spent a tremendous amount of time answering people’s questions on the group.

Later that day, I wandered into a crazy USENET flame war. Someone had created a group called alt.good-news. The group’s description said it was a place to share happy news—kind of like Upworthy in the days before the web. However, the phrase “the good news” has significant meaning to some Christians—it’s the good news that Christ is here to save us. Within hours, alt.good-news ironically deteriorated into a nasty flame fest with people arguing about whether it was a Christian group. I saw Oscar posting on the group, and sent him a private email: “Isn’t this flame war crazy? This group was supposed to be happy!” And he mailed me back:

“Don’t assume people always behave the way they behave when they talk about fish.”

It took only a moment’s exploration for me to learn that Oscar was actually a legendary USENET troll. Who just happened to also be an expert fish keeper who took pride in politely helping others with fish questions.

I think about Oscar a lot when I contemplate the mess that is Twitter. Social norms tend to be local, but on Twitter there is no local. People with radically different ideas of appropriate behavior run directly into one another. Or as one wise Redditor commented, “Twitter is like everyone shitposting on the same subreddit with no moderation.” Unfortunately, the blocking mechanisms we have at our disposal are crude. There’s no easy way to say, “I want to read what Oscar has to say about fish, but only about fish.” You either block Oscar or you don’t. And if you do decide to block him, there’s no easy way to say, “And please block him on the three other sites that we both use.” Our existing blocking mechanisms are too coarse grained and too weak.

The design of blocking mechanisms is in its infancy. Even farther behind is the design of understanding mechanisms. What if we could somehow scaffold people coming to a more nuanced understanding of the other person’s point of view, instead of just dismissing them entirely?

Got an idea for how to support more nuanced blocking or understanding? Leave me a comment!

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Mocking someone’s appearance on social media is admitting rhetorical defeat. In a non-fashion context. If we’re at a fashion show in Milan, that’s another story. But if we’re talking about any other topic, I propose that if someone says you look like a donkey, then you should reply: “I win!” Because you have. Because making such an irrelevant remark means, “I have hostile feelings towards you, but I don’t have any substantive arguments.”

I was thinking about this last week when an acquaintance posted on Facebook a picture of Hilary Clinton next to one of Captain Kangaroo (in a similar outfit), with the caption “Who wore it better?” This from a democrat. One of the most accomplished and experienced women in the world is a candidate for president, and this is what you post?

Which brings me to Donald Trump’s hair. Dear fellow democrats: Please stop mocking Donald Trump’s hair. It’s not funny, and it’s not enlightening. And every time you do it, you are screaming to the world: “I give up. I have nothing of substance to say. But hey, here’s a hair insult.”

Someone did indeed call me a donkey on Twitter last week. I am honored—I actually earned being trolled! Actually, my great uncle wrote Francis the Talking Mule, so I think the troll is confused—I have more mule in my background than donkey.

I have been researching GamerGate lately, and finding that both sides have valid points to make. And both sides have a mix of nice, principled people and angry people who are spewing bitter nonsense in public. I’ll have a lot more to say about this in the future. But for now, my advice for both sides is to calm TF down, and keep your sense of humor. And remember that if someone throws an irrelevant insult at you (like your outfit looks like Captain Kangaroo), then just laugh and say, “I win!”

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Everyone is a little bit racist, a little bit sexist. Mahzarin Benaji can prove it. When she asks people, “Do these two words go together?”, most people will click “yes” slightly quicker if shown “man” and “scientist” than “woman” and “scientist.” Even women scientists. You can do the same experiment for racism. It’s not that a few evil people are sexist or racist—we all are, to some degree.

Despite my awareness that everyone is a little bit racist, I am still astonished by the regular demonstration of that racism on the website Nextdoor.com. Nextdoor is a discussion site for people in a local neighborhood. Members share recommendations for plumbers, discuss traffic problems, and offer items for sale. It’s a nice site. A key topic of discussion is always about security. There have been a series of burglaries in my neighborhood recently, so residents are on the alert for “suspicious” people. And evidently any African American in our neighborhood may possibly be “suspicious,” according to my neighbors. Here’s yesterday’s example:

This morning was dog was ill. so I took her outside around 5:15 AM. I saw a car driving slowly … and stopping. The car stopped twice, a tall African American man wearing a dark sweatshirt dark pants and got out, kept his head lights on and walked up towards a house with his cell phone out. Then, walked back down to his car, got in, and continued driving slowly down the street. He kept his headlights on the entire time, even when the car was parked in the street. The car looked to be a beige/gold Mitsubishi. I was half asleep when I saw all of this and realized later I should have called 9-1-1. Just wanted folks to be aware.

Does that sound suspicious to you? Fortunately, another Nextdoor member pointed out:

Pretty sure he delivers the paper- i see him out several times a week- better safe than sorry though

I would laugh if I didn’t feel like crying. Because this happens all the time. Would people have worried that a man delivering papers was suspicious if he were white? I can’t prove that race was a factor here. But most of these incidents are about people of color. And it keeps happening.

In an incident last year, a mother posted an urgent alert that there was an attempted abduction of her seven-year-old daughter, who had been out walking the dog. There was a white van, following a white pickup truck. Right as her daughter was walking by, an African American man opened the door of the van and came towards her! Her daughter ran all the way home! The urgent alert received dozens of concerned replies. The police were called. And later that morning, I saw construction workers at a site three blocks away, with their white van and white pickup truck parked on the street.

It might help if people were simply more aware of this as a problem, but alerting people is hard. A couple weeks ago, a Nextdoor member in our neighborhood tried to draw attention to the problem of racism on the site, and got attacked by other participants. I waded in to merely say I think she might have a point, and I got attacked. The moderator shut down the discussion thread citing “policy violations on both sides.” So much for civil discourse.

The problem is not unique to Nextdoor—it’s just particularly easy to observe there. The site Hollaback takes an unusual approach to this problem—they discourage mentions of race. The purpose of Hollaback is to support discussion of street harassment. If someone cat calls you on the street or gropes you on the subway, you can go to Hollaback to share your experience—both to express your feelings, get support, and alert the community. But they discourage posters from mentioning the race of their harasser:

Due in part to prevalent stereotypes of men of color as sexual predators or predisposed to violence, HollaBackNYC asks that contributors do not discuss the race of harassers or include other racialized commentary

The more I see the everday racism of my neighbors on Nextdoor, the more I see the reasons for this policy. But it still feels like an extreme solution. (Someone groped me, and I can’t say what they looked like? I can hear the cries of political correctness gone mad.)

There really are (occasional) burglars in our neighborhood, and Nextdoor serves an important function by helping people alert one another. But is it possible to be a black man in our neighborhood and not be reported as suspicious?

The long-term solution is to all work to be less racist. To confront the tacit stereotypes we all hold,. In the short term, how do we stop social networks from making the problem worse? Leave me a comment.